Okay, welcome back. Actually this may be one of my favorite topics to talk about is pitch decks, because some people think that there's something hard about them or magical about them. I've had students ask me when we talk about doing pitch deck competitions, I had a student ask me, is this really a competition or is it figuratively a competition? So my response was, it's both. Figuratively, in the sense that you're going to be competing against other students, but it's a classroom environment. And then literally, as you're competing against my idea of what a perfect pitch deck is. So let's talk about what I think a perfect pitch deck is all about. And, as the first bullet point says, if you asked ten ten different VCs what their perfect pitch deck is, you get ten different answers, probably. Fred Wilson, of Union Square Ventures, talks about keeping it to six slides. I don't know how in the world you do that, honestly. Guy Kawasaki, I like his ideas, are basically use this 10/20/30 rule, which is 10 slides, talk for 20 minutes, and you use 30 point font. So people can see what you're representing upon the screen. So, regardless of how big it is, how many slides you have, what kind of font you use, the most important part of a pitch deck is that you have to tell a compelling story. You have to talk about the opportunity that you're going after, how is your product or your service going to resolve the problem, and then talk about your team. What team if I put together to get this done. And then other information provided, probably in an appendix that I've talked about in other lectures, and always maximum 15 slides. I don't like that many, but 10 to 15 slides is about what I consider to be a good sized pitch deck. So let's talk about my version of the perfect pitch deck. First of all, you have a cover page. Gives us the project name, tells people who you are, how do they get in touch with you. Even though you're in the organization, some companies are pretty big and you need to have your contact information. The second slide I like to see is what's the opportunity that you're going after. Are you solving a problem? Are you going after a strategic new market? Are you going to add to your existing product lines? Talk about the opportunity. Then talk about the team. The opportunity and the team are probably the two most important slides in the deck. If they don't think the opportunity's any good, you won't get funding. If they don't think the team can get the job done, you won't get the funding either. So, talk about those two early in the presentation. Then talk about your product or your solution, how it addresses the opportunity that you've just presented in slide number two. And then when you talk about opportunity size, you want to make sure that you have research behind your numbers. Don't just come up with numbers that you've kind of made up. That gets found out pretty quickly. There's enough information on the World Wide Web to find most any information on most any market you want. So go after some research, have numbers to support your opportunity size. Then the second half of the deck, we talk about the business model. That is, how do you make money for the corporation? Are you selling it as a SaaS product? Are you selling it as a stand-alone product? Are you going to be partnering with someone, going into a joint venture, perhaps? Talk about the model. And that you've thought through it and this model makes sense. Then you have to talk about the competition. And as I've said in other lectures, never say that there's no competition because that's probably not true. But talk about why you beat them. Why your product or service is better. Don't talk about how bad the other product is. That's never a good thing, it comes across poorly. So just talk about why your product is better than the competition. And then talk about how are you going to go to market. Part of the funding for the project is going to have to be, if you get follow on funding, is going to be how do you get this brought to market? Are you going after a distribution arm? Are you going to use your internal resources? How's it going to happen? [COUGH] And then talk about any traction you have. Hopefully, you have some pilot projects going on with existing customers, perhaps. If not, customers who have an interest in what you're doing are, let's say prospective customers, who have an interest in what you're doing. And you've gotten them to agree to do pilots. And if you can demonstrate that the customer or the prospective customer has said, if your product or service does what you say it does, I will buy it, that's very, very powerful. And then finally, ask for the money. How much money do you need? What are you going to do with it? What's the use of proceeds? This is not unlike going out and pitching to a venture capitalist, it's just you're pitching to your own internal funding group, most of the time. So some additional thoughts on pitch decks is put detailed information into an appendix, like financial projections or head count projections or anything that's maybe important to discuss. Maybe a question and answer period comes up and they say, what's the financials projections for the next two years. If you can go to the appendix and pull up a financial statement, that's good. And if they asked you questions, that's also good. I can't emphasize enough that before you go to do a formal pitch in front of a funding source, you want to practice your pitch. Get in front of the people that are friends, friendly to you, do the pitch, do dry runs, time it. If they have a time limit, you want to make sure you fall within the time limit. And get feedback. You'll be sure to get a better result if you do this, excuse me. I like a quote from David Cowan, Bessemer Venture Partners who says, a PowerPoint greatly increases your chance of getting an approval or the dignity of a quick no. And both of those are actually beneficial.
